The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

On the surface, Armi Ratia and Lilly Pulitzer have a lot in common. Both women got their start in the 1950s and became famous for producing fabrics printed with bright colors and bold graphics. Both had a spirited, playful appeal—Pulitzer had her kitschy duck and turtle patterns, and Ratia named her company Marimekko, which translates from the Finnish as “little Mary dress.” And Jackie Kennedy brought a jolt of publicity to both labels when she turned up in magazine features wearing their dresses.

But in deeper ways, Ratia was the thinking woman’s Pulitzer. The latter was an eccentric New York socialite who got into the apparel business in the late fifties, after friends became smitten with the uniforms she made for workers at her juice shop in Palm Beach. Ratia, however, was ambitious from the start, a charismatic art director whose business sense was as sharp as her eye for talent. In 1951, when Finland was still emerging from the shadow of World War II, she was looking to make her mark in the male-dominated design world—and did so in large part by banking on inexperienced women fresh out of design school. She was also looking back to modernist “gesamkunstwerk” ideals like Germany’s Bauhaus movement, where designers of all kinds came together to apply their individual talents to a larger, progressive, even utopian vision. (Nevertheless, as with so many designer objects touted for their accessibility, Marimekko was and is relatively exclusive—Old Navy it ain’t.) 

These days, with companies like Target bringing “good design” to the masses, it’s difficult to imagine how radical Marimekko was at its inception. During a time when staid florals dominated Finnish textiles, Maija Isola, one of the company’s first and most famous designers, began turning out idiosyncratic figurative patterns and large-scale abstractions of stones, birds, and leaves. Like her compatriot, the architect Alvaar Aalto, she borrowed from Finnish folkloric traditions while simultaneously blazing modernist trails. Then there was the cut of Marimekko clothing. Even as Christian Dior’s wasp-waisted postwar “New Look” was spreading internationally, Marimekko became possibly the first label to put forth an “anti-fashion” message with the designs of Vuokko Nurmesniemi. Aiming to create clothing to accentuate the wearer’s personality rather than her figure, Nurmesniemi’s voluminous shapes and simple lines were also well suited to Marimekko’s large-scale patterns.

Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, which is on view at the Rochester Art Center (through August 20, 507-282-8629), traces the evolution of Marimekko through the sixties, seventies, and on up to its present-day revival. Interestingly, among all the suspended fabric swaths and lovely, covetable dresses, it’s the video montage of publicity and industrial footage that speaks most clearly about Marimekko’s fresh, fun, and decidedly quirky sensibility. One especially piquant segment shows a gaggle of rosy-cheeked, Marimekko-clad youths cavorting on a rocky Finnish seashore. They gather in a circle and, laughing all the while, pass around a massive goblet of orange juice as a toast to clean living and tasteful clothing.—Julie Caniglia